Twice a month I send ten of them out. A typeface painted on an awning, a booklet somebody stapled together on a kitchen table, a stairwell with its numbers hand-drawn. Small, made carefully, mostly unnoticed.
There is no team here and no queue of submissions. I walk, I read, I listen, and when something holds me for longer than it should, it goes on the list with a note about why. If a fortnight gives me four things instead of ten, you get four. I would rather be short than padded.
Whoever painted this understood weight. The R has a leg that kicks out further than any digital face would allow, and it works because the awning is read from below and from a moving tram. I stood across the street for ten minutes trying to decide whether it was drawn from a specimen or from memory. Memory, I think.
Kern left a recorder on the Cobblers' Bridge before sunrise and did nothing else. The water is almost inaudible; what you actually hear is the city deciding to start — a shutter, a bicycle, one gull with an opinion. It is the least edited thing I have listened to this year and the one I have replayed most.
Warm grey, slightly furred at the edge, and the shop's stamp bites into it instead of sitting on top. I bought a metre of chain I did not need in order to get one. Ask for a receipt even when you do not want one; someone chose that paper decades ago and nobody has overruled them yet.
The numbers are stamped, not printed, so they have survived sixty years of pockets. What sold me was the resistance in the hinges: enough that it holds any angle you leave it at. Tools that remember where you put them are rarer than they should be. I use it as a paperweight, which it would probably resent.
All ninety copies were trimmed by hand, so the block is slightly out of square and the pages fan when you hold it. Rihtar photographs bus shelters at dusk and sequences them by how much light is left. The last four pages are almost black and that is the point. Thirty copies were left when I wrote this.
Four floors, four numerals, four different hands — you can see where the ladder was and where whoever held the brush got tired. The 3 is upside down and has been for as long as anyone in the building remembers. Nobody has fixed it. Go and stand on the second landing and look up.
Picks 07 to 10 went out to readers on 17 July
Read the latest issue →“I would rather hand you one thing I cannot stop looking at than fifty things I merely approve of.”
The whole method fits on this page, which is deliberate. If it needed more explaining than this, it would not be honest.
I look for myself. Nothing is submitted, nothing is traded, and no place in the list has ever been paid for. If that changes you will read it here first.
Ten is a ceiling, not a target. A thin fortnight gets a thin issue. Padding a list to reach a round number is how a selection stops being one.
I have held it, read it, heard it, or stood in front of it. No pick arrives second-hand. If I could only see photographs of something, it waits until I can see the thing.
Every pick carries a note in my own words. If I cannot say in three sentences why it held me, it was not really a pick — it was just something I noticed.
Occasionally a maker gives me a reader code. When that happens I say so plainly in the issue, and it never moves anything up the list.
Want the next ten? Write to contact@alopicks.com with the word index and I will add you by hand.
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